Eldritch and Cantankerous

The initial read-through is done. I’ve made a list of some questions that still need answering, and a couple of entries remain to be written. I’m done with most of the source material on hand. I’m still debating whether I want to go through some later Grant stuff, but I think my desire for completeness will be more balanced out by my desire not to read long passages of mystical revelation written by extradimensional spiders. It’s just not my thing.

Anyway, I’ve got two questions for people. First, if a Howard fan could identify the first story in which his Hyborian kingdom of Khem appears, I’d appreciate it.

The second question is for the Lovecraftians. In “The Colour out of Space” and “Dreams in the Witch-House“, Lovecraft mentions a small island in the Miskatonic River, calling it “the small island in the Miskatonic,” “the unpeopled island,” “the ill-regarded island,” and “that desolate island.” I’ve got no idea on how to put it in the book in such a way that anyone can actually find it. Arkham Horror refers to it as the Unvisited Isle, which is silly, considering how many people end up visiting it during the game. The Marsh and Marsh book Other Nations calls it “Themystos’ Island,” but nobody’s going to look for that.

I have a number of different options here. I can put it under one of these titles and use all the other possible names as cross-references. (But which one will be the main entry?) Or I can subsume it within the Miskatonic River entry. I’m just having trouble coming up with an intuitive place to put it, so someone looking for it can find it. If you’ve got an idea, please let me know.

Merging the island entry with Miskatonic isn’t the worst idea. Personally, if I couldn’t find it under its numerous varied names, Miskatonic is the second place I would go to look. There seems to be no easy solution to this one, but a logical placement in Miskatonic would still let almost anyone find it without too much sifting around.

I was never sure Khem was a Hyborian kingdom. There’s Khemi the Stygian port city and the pre-hyborian Khari and Zhemi but I don’t remember any Khem (I couldn’t find any reference to it in ‘The Hyborian Age’ either). But I’m certainly not encyclopedic in my knowledge.

I re-examined the entry, and you’re right – I had looked at the bottom, seen Howard, and decided it started with him. Instead, he was incorporated into the myth of Khem by later authors, meaning Lumley gets the “original” notation.